Intersections

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Read the articles online:

• Emerging church profiles: Furthering the reign of God– Lora Steiner
• Inviting Outsiders– Gay Brunt Miller
• At the End of Ethnic Mennonite Life– Michael A. King
• Global shared convictions series: Where is the dove?– Blaine Detwiler
• Pilgrims on a Journey: Exploring Mennonite Spirituality– Forrest L. Moyer
• Motivated by the spirit of generosity: Living out their love for God– Brandon Bergey
• Celebrating a donation of time: Working to alleviate poverty– Cory Suter
• Scenes from the Junior High Lock In…

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Gay Brunt Miller, Spring Mount

God’s Spirit is moving among us! And I believe that it is as Blaine Detwiler describes “God’s unruly Spirit” causing a deep sense of restlessness in my own soul.

I love the church…from my local congregation, Spring Mount Mennonite Church, to my conference work that connects with congregations, conference related ministries and partners in mission. I love my connections with Mennonite Church USA and the amazingly gifted sisters and brothers I am learning to know through that work. I eat, sleep and drink church—it’s both my vocation and my passion. I’m grateful that God has put me here, in this time and in this place.

However I am also sensing this growing restlessness. A restlessness that upsets the complacency I may feel because church is my life. Isn’t that enough?

The rub seems to come when I realize that everything I do for God and the church is within the literal and/or figurative walls of our church community. My growing sense is that our church walls are sometimes a little too cozy, too familiar and too safe. Work within our church walls is important but if that is the only place we see our mission we fall short of God’s heart and vision for the Good News that the church is to be in world that desperately needs healing and hope.

I recently attended a memorial service for a young woman, Vicki, who died of a drug overdose. Vicki committed her life to Christ a year ago, and God did some amazing things in her life…but one night she made some bad choices that resulted in her death.

When time was given for people to share memories about Vicki, a friend from her church, Tina, shared the incredible change and transformation she had seen in Vicki after she committed her life to Christ. Tina gave clear and passionate testimony to the power of God in Vicki’s life.

During lunch I talked with Tina. I learned that the church she attends is focused on ministry for 20-somethings, a group often missing from our congregations. I asked Tina how her congreagtion reaches this group. “You have to go out and bring them in,” she replied, “they are not likely to walk into a church on their own!”

I pressed her for more details and after some hesitation, she told me of her most recent ministry: to reach out to exotic dancers! She shared how desperately these women long to experience real love–how they are used and abused by men who tell them that they “love” them, but that love is merely lust for their bodies. Tina knows the depths of their pain and despair–she had been one of them.

In Matthew 9:10-13, Jesus is eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” When challenged by the Pharisees about this, Jesus replies, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I like the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases that last sentence in The Message: “I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

In “At the end of ethnic Mennonite life,” Michael King invites us to grapple with the nitty-gritty of reaching beyond the Swiss-German ethnic heritage in which many of us have grown up as Mennonites. This heritage is noble and valuable. Yet how can we widen this wonderful foundation to become the church of Revelation 7:9-11, where all nations and tribes, races and languages join with around the throne and the Lamb? Who can we reach out to and invite to come in?

Not all of us are called to reach out to exotic dancers, but God has called us to reach beyond our comfort zones, to “go out and bring them in.” Jesus was not content to focus his entire ministry on those inside the church in his day. Nor should we be.

Michael A. King, Spring Mount
mking@cascadiapublishinghouse.com

Some of us are living at the end of ethnic Mennonite subcultures. How we analyze or address our situations will differ; what I see in my contexts may not apply in others. But I find myself forced, as pastor, husband and father, to wrestle with the transition from ethnic Mennonitism.

Several factors have heightened my sense of needing to address this transition. Foremost is my experience as pastor at Spring Mount Mennonite Church. I was called to the congregation in 1997 as an interim pastor whose role, it was thought at the time, might include helping the congregation bury itself with dignity. Years of challenges had weakened the congregation, but as often as we discussed burial in those early days, the congregation refused to die, probably partly because having its back to the wall generated new urgency to work at turnaround.

It was unlikely this primarily Swiss-German congregation could again thrive by drawing more Swiss-German Mennonite members. We would somehow have to welcome participants from our local communities or die.

But how? The story is still being written. Yet at least two moves seem to have been essential to generating growth of community participation to the point that some Sundays a majority of worship participants were raised in settings other than Mennonite.

One factor has been strengthening connections with community networks. A key move here has been to hire Don McDonough, himself raised in and part of such a network, as associate pastor.

A second factor has been working at discerning this: What aspects of how Mennonites “do” church are rooted in Swiss-German ethnic heritage and so should not be imposed on participants of different ethnic backgrounds—many of whom start out thinking Mennonite = horse and buggy?

What aspects are part of the gospel core as viewed through the Anabaptist tradition that shaped but preceded the Mennonites who took their name from Menno Simons—the Catholic priest turned Anabaptist? To echo the Gentile versus Jewish discernment the apostle Paul enaged, what are the beyond-ethnic-culture factors with potential to be good news for persons of any background?

The need for such discernment was underscored again when I helped teach a course on Anabaptist history and theology offered in Pennsylvania settings often populated by Swiss-German Mennonites. At the outset I held up a copy of The Merging: A Story of Two Families and Their Child (DreamSeeker Books, 2000) by Evelyn King Mumaw. The cover shows my grandparents, Irvin and Cora King, in the classic plain clothing they wore throughout most of their lives. Beneath them is my Aunt Evie, also in plain dress.

Just looking at that cover draws me back into still-living memories of growing up in that plain-dressing culture and all that such clothing symbolized. The cover plunges me back into images of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a community set apart, different, viewing those within its boundaries as members of the faithful remnant. The cover reminds me of being a young boy once so socialized into an alternate Mennonite country that I asked my father when I would get my own plain coat.

I invited Don to supplement my lectures with his perspectives as an Anabaptist who became Mennonite after growing up Lutheran. He is more strongly committed to being Anabaptist than whatever it means to be Mennonite. The world of my aunt’s book cover is not in his bones.

We expected the Anabaptist class that day to be maybe half ethnic Mennonites, like me, and half adult-choice Mennonites, like Don. I held up the cover as a doorway into my world and expected Don’s recounting of how a Lutheran became Mennonite to be a doorway into his world. Then all of us would ponder what it means to work in congregations mixing persons raised in Swiss-German ethnic Mennonite settings with those raised in other communities and ethnicities.

To our surprise, no students had been raised in Mennonite families. They knew about that plain-dressing separated world, but they knew of it only as what seemed to be a bygone age. We had to refocus our presentation. What does it mean to be Mennonite if being Mennonite involves no Swiss-German markers or memories of a set-apart community?

This is a question I’ve also pondered closer to home. In the 1970s, while friends were marrying other Mennonites, I married Joan, an American Baptist who has become a committed Anabaptist-Mennonite but, like Don, from outside my subcultural community. I, who had registered as a conscientious objector just before the Vietnam War draft ended, was adopted as in-law into a family which not only experienced its Christianity as blending nearly seamlessly into larger American culture but also included veterans of military service. They learned to love me often despite rather than because of my odd beliefs and Swiss-German love for shoo-fly pies.

Our three young adult daughters were raised in that mix of subcultures and attended both public and Mennonite schools. They have attended Mennonite churches all their lives. They have worshiped among Mennonites who still dress plainly. They have experienced learning through family funerals where parts of their extended family, even young people, still dress plainly. They’ve heard my stories of growing up in that different country. Yet even as they understand that country better than those who have never visited it, it’s not fully their own. Like the Anabaptist class in which no students were from Swiss-German Mennonite backgrounds, when my daughters visit my country, they are tourists respectfully studying it, not citizens fundamentally shaped by it.

Where then from here? Any answer requires discussion, not just proclamation. But a strategy that seems compelling to me is this: At least in some settings in which Mennonitism has become overwhelmingly intertwined with ethnic cultural practices, we may need to move from Mennonite to anabaptist values.

C. Norman Kraus, in “Anabaptist or Mennonite? Interpreting the Bible” (Using Scripture in a Global Age, Cascadia, 2006), says that “Anabaptism with a lower case ‘a’ is . . . an attempt to adapt and adopt the insights and values of 16th-century Anabaptism as a guide to the interpretation and use of Scripture in our 21st century American culture.” Kraus points to the many cultural forms global Mennonitism has taken and ways generic anabaptism can provide distinctive and unifying ways of viewing the Bible and world amid a dizzying array of shifting Mennonite cultural practices. Something like that is what I find myself working at implementing as pastor, husband, father.

This is not to suggest ethnically influenced Mennonite practices lack value. It is not to disrespect Mennonites, past or present, whose plain dress has meant to convey faithful following of Christ.

It is not simplistically to flee the name “Mennonite.” It is not to suggest that any congregation or individual exists above or outside of culture. Nor is it to insist that making “Mennonite” a more culture-bound term and “anabaptist” a name less tied to culture is the only or even best way to conceptualize matters; I experience these matters as a yet to be solved riddle.

Nevertheless, there are basic differences between those of us who grew up in my Swiss-German Mennonite world and those raised in their many alternate settings that must somehow be named and worked at. Sometimes to be Mennonite is too easily equated with joining not only a way of understanding faith but also the subcultural expressions of that faith as they have emerged in tightly-knit communities of persons sharing similar immigrant backgrounds, histories and often generations of inbreeding. Then it’s important to find ways to speak of core faith commitments that disentangle from ethnic expressions.

This is why in my various roles I often find the vocabulary of a generic anabaptism helpful. Such a vocabulary can help those raised in settings other than Mennonite to grasp what aspects of becoming Mennonite involve commitments to faith values rather than optional ethnic practices.

This is why I often feel impelled less to address Mennonite concerns intertwined with a particular ethnicity and more to ask Anabaptist-tinged questions like these: Where is right living to be found in today’s complex moral crosscurrent?

What does the body of Christ look like for those who find it more meaningful to commune in Facebook or MySpace than Sunday morning worship services?

What does it mean to believe “But I say to you, love your enemies” as we view terrorists or war in Iraq?

And what might it look like to ask such questions from within ordinary lives planted among many subcultures, not only from within that country behind my aunt’s book cover?

Reprinted by permission from DreamSeeker Magazine, where this article first appeared (Winter 2007, pp. 18-22)

Blaine Detwiler, Lakeview
detwiler@nep.net

I have no qualms with our Mennonite Church USA logo, a dove with an olive branch carried in its beak, except that a logo has its limits.

I have no doubt that God’s Holy Spirit very often “touches down” on people like it did on Jesus, as a dove gently, peacefully and with goodwill from the Father in heaven above. Except, to argue that a dove has its limits.

It made immediate sense to me the day I first heard there was another early Christian group who chose a different bird for their spiritual logo. Living in their harsh northern climates these Christians decided a wild goose should stand in for what is good, what is strident and unnerving about God’s Spirit.

I must say that I have always loved wind. There are days when I fantasize giving up my day jobs to become a tornado chaser. On a darkening summer day as a thunderstorm pushes in from the west I am apt to run outside in our back yard and face it, to feel its bluster. In December several nor’easter storms brushed our area with their ferocity. One Sunday as trees blew down we canceled our worship service and, during the height of what a sailor might call “a blow,” I pulled on my boots and ventured outside. Ice pellets were whipping their sideways path to the ground and stung my face red when I chanced to face them.

I always welcome a good reading of Psalm 29. When I hear “The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire…The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness…The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare…” I begin wondering where a dove goes and finds refuge in the middle of all this fierce “glory.”

Studies show that Mennonites, myself included, have a strong preference for using the Gospels in preaching. And rightly so. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are full of colorful Jesus dramas. But where the Gospels leave off there quickly comes this strange and wonderful experience of the Holy Spirit. The book of Acts says this fresh arrival comes with its own distinct sound, the sound of wind. Not just any wind but a violent wind. And again, I wonder how the dove is doing, where it goes and why this wind sound needs to be so “gusty,” so violent!

Our daughter Becky and her family of three live in a rented house on an Old Order Mennonite farm in Dayton, VA. Their landlords are a hospitable older farm couple, Margaret and James. Margaret manages the kitchen. On a slow afternoon James will take up his digging spade and with a blue handkerchief in his rear pocket go walking their farm fields in search of thistles. Those purple flower weeds which appear as a smudge on the landscape of any farm worth its salt need to be dug out. James is not alone in his thistle work or in his soul work.

Julia Kasdorf, with a poet’s candor, captures some of the conflict historically present in our collective soul as her poem called Mennonites begins;

We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up after disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other’s feet
twice a year and eat the Lord’s Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.

I have no regrets when God’s spirit comes quietly. When without words a tear begins sliding down the cheek with a forgiveness of inner healing so gentle that even a dove might be jealous. It is hard to object when falling snowflakes surprise a place like Baghdad and we marvel as their silent drift puts a delight on the face of a despondent city. Healing and hope carry a quiet mystery all their own.

But there are times when God’s spirit gets unruly. There are times when the Spirit of God gains a momentum with such force that old habits like trees are uprooted. Times when a powerful addiction like money can turn and go storming towards generosity. Times when it takes a more forceful move of the spirit to unseat the damning sins we carry deep inside us. When attitudes of fist-clenched hatred begin to loose their grip. Times when churches are not so much formally planned, organized and nurtured but instead jump up on street corners where we least expect them. In the book of Acts the high wind of the spirit makes 120 people appear as if they were drunk. And I find myself wondering where the dove was perched that day.

Let us make whatever claims we need for a logo to hold. But let’s also remember that when the wind of God’s Holy Spirit blows through our lives a new community is formed and, like the aftermath of a good nor’easter, nothing will be the same.

Left: The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, La.
Right: A candle representing the Holy Spirit in a worship service.